Windows 7: Image your system with free Macrium

One hour is about right for 85GB if the backup device is USB2 attached.

Keith, if I understood that right, they were imaging to an internal 5400RPM HDD. But 1 hour may still be right because of all the traffic on the Sata bus and the slow disks.

You may be right Wolfgang. I don't have any experience of SATA to SATA internal drives. The USB2 drives I use are limited by the USB transfer rate.

The recovery process took 2hrs 48mins. That is way too long.

– mrimg file is 58.4GB
– in Acronis I can choose compression ratio
– Yes, I am using the WinPE Rescue ISO burned to CD that whs was nice enough to share

Somehow I'm thinking I did not ignore free space and deleted files, but my mrimg file is only 58.4GB and with the WinPE recovery disc I did not notice any recovery options.

Here's the funny thing, it was actually faster when I used a 1TB external USB 3.0 drive for recovery (took ~47mins) and the drive was connected to a USB 2.0 port because the laptop does not have USB 3.0 so transfer speed was limited by bus.

Don't know why SATA to SATA is slower, very weird…

My C drive is around 90GB. It creates an image of around 40GB and takes about 55 minutes to a usb2 attached drive. I would guess that Wolfgang is correct about the cause of your slowness.

That's why I decided to copy the mrimg to my internal SATA drive, hoping the recovery time will be faster but it ended up taking almost 3hrs.

That is definitely too long. But if I read that right, that was not on the system you specified in your user profile. The slowest recovery I ever had on a modest laptop was about 30 minutes.

Hmm. I wonder if there are problems with the disks.

The free space and compression options are determined when you create the backup,
not when you restore.

The WinPE Recovery Disc however can create backups and may well allow options for the creation.

SATA to SATA is very fast for me.
My 55 GB SSD has 11.4 GB in use
Macrium produced 6.13 GB *.mrimg image backup in 244 Seconds on my secondary internal HDD
and even more amazing
it takes only 58 seconds to compare that 6.13 GB plus another 0.5 GB of a two subsequent differential files
with the 11.4 GB in the current SSD,
and produce a third differential of only 164 MB.

I find it suspicious that SATA to USB2 is faster than SATA to SATA.
N.B. Some USB3 drives claim to gracefully fall back to USB2 speed when on a USB2 port.
Some perhaps are less graceful and fall back to USB1.

I suggest to test SATA to SATA you copy a very large file from your system HDD to the backup HDD,
and measure with a stop watch - or a sundial

P.S.
It took about 3 minutes for the WinPE Rescue to read the 6.13 + 0.5 + 0.164 GB and restore my SSD.

Would it have anything to do with me deleting the volume beforehand? I wanted to test if the program works on a empty volume so I popped the Windows 7 install disc and deleted the volume before I performed a recovery.

Something I didn't mention, when I booted off the WinPE disc it asks me to load drivers, are there any drivers that need to be loaded before the recovery process?

Could be a possibility.

I just imaged c: again to my secondary internal HDD and it took 22mins. Approx ~85GB and the resulting mrimg is 58.3GB.